While researching the material for The Psychology of Persuasive Propaganda, I came across a book by Jacques Ellul called Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Like much of the material I was pulling up at the time, I saved it in my favorites folder with the intent of “getting to it later.” Apparently, later means almost two months after my own book was published, but who would have known? Written in 1962, when a great deal of research on propaganda was being done, the book expresses some interesting ideas that kind of, in a roundabout way, refute some of the points I made in my book. Maybe refute isn’t the right word. I cited many studies published in psychology, sociology, and communications journals discussing the processes of propaganda and the effects of persuasion. Basically, I discussed what is known about human behavior and our responses to persuasive messaging. Ellul says these types of studies can hardly encompass what he calls “total propaganda” because they are essentially snapshots in time, focusing on one aspect. Whereas real propaganda is a continuous, never-ending assault on human faculties. It isn’t that my work lacks some similar sentiments about the continuous nature of propaganda; however, Ellul makes some interesting points. Most of my material focuses on the definition of propaganda, suggesting it is all geared towards getting the target audience to accept what would otherwise be rejected through techniques of lies and behavioral manipulation. Ellul rejects this definition, saying that adopting such a view prevents a complete understanding of real propaganda, which he says is employed in a vastly different way than in the past. This was in the 1960s, mind you. The one thing that resonates true between my book and Ellul’s is that there is an inherent understanding of human psychology that the propagandists have and use when formulating their messages.
First of all, modern propaganda is based on scientific analyses of psychology and sociology. Step by step, the propagandists builds his technique on the basis of the knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning—and as much on social psychology as on depth psychology. (Ellul, 1962)
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